Estimating accurate real-time network state statistics on any network router/switch, enables network administrators to provide services to their users. Instances of such services include bounded delay for a specific path, bounded delay for specific applications, low jitter, zero-touch deployment in an enterprise fabric, dynamic centralized routing, congestion and loss prevention, and others.
Real-time network state statistics may be generated by polling each of the routers along the one or more flow paths being evaluated using, for example, Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets or other special probes. There is an inherent propagation and processing delay associated with every real-world network which prevents any system based on polling of every router being evaluated to be able to achieve statistics in true real-time. In other words, even if polling data could be polled from each router, it needs to be transmitted to a network controller, which takes a not insignificant amount of time. Hence, the data is observed at the network controller some meaningful time after the events that the data represents actually took place.